An upgrade to the CMS@Home workflow management system (WMAgent) is planned for tomorrow (Wed Sep 27th). This needs the current batch of jobs to be stopped so that the queue is empty. I plan to do this about 0700-0800 UTC on Wednesday.
To avoid "error while computing" task failures and the resulting back-off of your daily quotas, we suggest you set all your CMS machines to No New Tasks at least 12 hours beforehand to allow current tasks to time out in the normal way. You can stop BOINC once all your tasks are finished, if you wish.
Exactly how long the intervention will take is unclear, and there will be a delay of up to an hour to get a new batch of jobs queued afterwards. I will post here when jobs are available again, hopefully before the end of the day European time.

It's best to let your tasks run out before stopping BOINC, which is why we suggest setting No New Tasks. Otherwise you run the risk of the current job failing when it reports, since its batch will no longer be active.

One particular component is taking time to drain. We may not have more CMS jobs until some time on Thursday. Naturally I'll let you know as soon as we are running again but for now feel free to let your computers relax, or work on some other project overnight.

They are "administrative" tasks I think, probably LogMerge since they seem mainly to be failing. :-( [LogMerge jobs try to write to a machine I don't (yet) have credentials for.] A couple of the WMAgent components were down since the weekend but Alan wasn't around to re-start them; I didn't try any further afield as they didn't seem to be affecting volunteer jobs. I now know another scientist who can restart failed components, and also where to report it if she's also not available.
[Edit] Yes, they are mainly LogCollect jobs. I should have advised Alan to just kill them and do the update; I guess it's too late in the day now so we shall see whether they have all timed out overnight. If they are like normal HTCondor jobs they will retry twice before quitting. [/Edit]

OK, the agent has been updated, and I've submitted a small test batch. However, the agent is currently showing a message about its proxy certificate having expired, so I'm not sure if jobs will be queued yet. I've notified Alan, but it's 2315 at CERN so I don't expect him to respond tonight. I'll update if and when things change.

OK, the agent has been updated, and I've submitted a small test batch. However, the agent is currently showing a message about its proxy certificate having expired, so I'm not sure if jobs will be queued yet. I've notified Alan, but it's 2315 at CERN so I don't expect him to respond tonight. I'll update if and when things change.

Right, Alan responded already, there are jobs in the queue and 800 are running. In the words of the Antz Pantz ad, "Sic 'em, Rex!"

The CMS job queue is empty, apparently due to some difficulties with an upgrade at CERN. Best to set your CMS machines to "No New Tasks" for now.

There are jobs in the queue again (since 0200 GMT) but there are also still problems "behind the scenes" at CERN. There have been people working extremely long hours on this -- I suspect they may be taking a break for some sleep right now.